Even at the age of 75, the Jamaican singer is still on stage and amazes her audience with crazy performances.
When you’re as timeless and hyperactive as Grace Jones, you have no time for nostalgia. Even in old age, the extravagant exceptional artist, who will be 75 on May 19, always looks ahead.
“Nostalgia doesn’t interest me,” she said a few years ago. “For me, the most important thing is not to live in the past. I live in the present and look forward, to the future. I don’t appear in retro shows, but at festivals like Afropunk or Wilderness, because that’s where they’re going young people today. This is my world, not the memory of something long gone.”
It is understandable that the high priestess of extravagance does not want to be reduced to her role as a style icon of the 1970s and 1980s. After all, she is still a style icon and will continue to tour relentlessly with her spectacular shows in 2023.
Total work of art Grace Jones
Grace Jones’ extraordinarily androgynous look was part of her art from the start. It is not surprising that she started her long career as a model, only to expand from there as a total work of art.
Her story begins in Jamaica, where she was born Grace Beverly Jones on May 19, 1948 in Spanish Town near the Jamaican capital of Kingston. At the beginning of the 1960s, she and her family moved to the USA, where she soon dropped out of school in order to make ends meet as a go-go dancer in nightclubs.
Start your career as a supermodel
At 18, the shrill rebel got her first model contract with the renowned agency Wilhelmina Models. “They had trouble booking me, though,” she recalled. “I looked a lot freakier then than I do now.” The agency’s courage to use a model with what was, at the time, an absolutely strange look paid off pretty quickly. At the beginning of the seventies, the newcomer was sent to the fashion metropolis of Paris, where the really big jobs were waiting for her. Soon she landed on the covers of “Vogue” and “Elle, modeling for sophisticated labels such as Yves St. Laurent and Kenzo.
Cooperation with Helmut Newton
Even at this early stage in her career, she demonstrated her talent for always surrounding herself with the right people. Through her work with famous photographers such as Helmut Newton (1920-2004), Guy Bourdin (1928-1991) and Jean-Paul Goude (84), she finally became a prominent supermodel in the early 1970s.
Disco era freak queen
In addition to her modeling job, she began pursuing her musical ambitions in the early 1970s. She had her first appearance as a singer at a show by the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake (1938-2022). In 1977 she released her debut album “Portfolio”, which was shaped by the disco hype of the time, which was followed by two more disco discs until 1979.
With her songs and various cover versions in her luggage, she tottered through all the big clubs of that wild time, such as “Studio 54” in New York or “Le Palace” in Paris. In New York, she moved in the circle of Andy Warhol and never missed an opportunity to shock at the city’s parties with extravagant outfits.
Radical change of image in the early 1980s
With the dawn of the 1980s, she had had enough of disco and decided to make a radical change of image. In her 2015 memoir, I’ll Never Write My Memoires, she says, “Disco was an accident, within a couple of years I had released my three disco albums, produced by Tom Moulton. They became more his vision than mine. I became the decoration and that bored me.”
Boredom should not arise in the further course of her career. From now on, Grace Jones did her own thing and finally developed into the unique fictional character that is associated with her name today. Her partner at the time, Jean-Paul Goude, who, as a photographer and graphic designer, played a key role in her development into a cool style icon of the eighties, played a central role in her conscious change of image. He also designed the iconic cover of the album “Nightclubbing”, on which one can admire the “new” Grace Jones with an extremely geometric hairstyle, a cold gaze and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth.
New look, new sound
In Chris Maxwell (84), the founder of the label Island Records, she also found a man who actively supported her on her new musical path. With a band of top-class studio musicians put together for her, she was finally able to record the music that corresponded to her nature. In this line-up she recorded three albums in rapid succession – Warm Leatherette (1980), Nightclubbing (1981) and Living My Life (1982) – with which she established her world fame as a musician.
In contrast to the previous disco discs, this time she was also involved in the production and thus got the opportunity to develop her own musical style. The music on these albums consisted of an extremely danceable style mix of new wave, reggae and electronic elements. In keeping with the new sound, Grace Jones developed a unique, always somewhat chilled-looking rap that would become her trademark.
However, the songs unleashed their full power in combination with their bizarre stage performances, where she liked to come on stage in a gorilla costume or confused the audience by outfitting the dancers with Grace Jones masks and Armani suits. The fact that she repeatedly mixed up gender roles contributed significantly to her status as a queer icon.
Final commercial breakthrough
The big commercial breakthrough finally came in the mid-1980s, when she conquered the charts with songs like “Slave to the Rhythm” and finally became a media darling. During this time, she also expanded her artistic work to include films and appeared in films such as “James Bond 007 – In the View of Death” or “Conan the Destroyer”.
After 1989, no further albums were released for a period of almost twenty years, only in 2008 did she impressively follow up with the album “Hurricane”. Nevertheless, she has always remained present as a performance artist for her loyal fan base with regular shows all over the world.
No cooperation with young stars
She has remained uncompromisingly true to herself to this day. Although she regularly receives offers for lucrative collaborations from today’s music stars, she mostly declines with thanks, as she reports in her autobiography.
It says: “I remember one of the singers on the list of those who asked me saying she wanted to work with me. Everyone around me was like, ‘You have to do this, it will introduce you to a whole new audience introduce and you’ll make a lot of money’. No! It’ll be good for her; she’ll take advantage of everything I’ve built and add it to her brand and I’ll get nothing in return except a little passing attention. It It’s okay that I’m not worrying about new audiences. If that shit doesn’t feel right then don’t.”
Source: Stern
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
